In commonly owned U.S. Pat. No. 6,684,602 a bottling apparatus is described having a frame having a horizontally extending upper portion and a horizontally extending lower portion separated from the upper portion by an open space and an endless conveyor element on the frame having a horizontal lower stretch in the frame lower portion, an upper stretch above the space in the frame upper portion, and upstream and downstream upright stretches extending between and interconnecting upstream and downstream ends of the upper and lower stretches. A drive advances the element continuously in a horizontal transport direction in the lower stretch. A plurality of holders secured to the element each form a transverse row of seats adapted to fit snugly around necks of respective bottles that are loaded into the holders at the upstream end of the lower stretch with mouths of the bottles open upward into the space and the bottles hanging by their necks from the lower stretch. Machines or subassemblies carried on the frame lower portion in the space below the frame upper portion clean, fill, and cap bottles in the seats moving in the transport direction. A device for checking the seal of the covers applied to vessels in such an apparatus is described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,930,345.
Such an apparatus can be used to fill bottles, cups, and the like with a fluent food stuff. For instance upwardly flaring cups can be filled with yogurt and a flat metallic-foil cover disk can be applied to the upper rim after filling. A conveyor typically formed as upper and lower stretches passes in a horizontal transport direction through a frame of the apparatus, and forms a plurality of rows each extending horizontally perpendicular to the direction. The apparatus normally has a vessel-loading unit at its upstream end that loads the rows and an unloading unit at the downstream end. Between the ends is a filling station where at least one row of the vessels is filled at a time, and between the filling station and the unloading station is a sealing/capping station where the covers are applied. A cover testing device with a reject puller can be provided between the sealing station and the unloading station.
The capping or cover-applying unit typically forms a separate subassembly having at least one row of cappers each provided with one container receptacle, corresponding in number to the amount of container receptacle lines. An example for such a capper might be a closing head for lid foils of food containers with hot-melt adhesive coating on the insides according to DE 44 04 984. Several such closing heads are for example aligned in a row extended perpendicular to the transport direction of the device, as well as combined to a structural component, the closing subassembly. This subassembly is very complex and, because it is dealing with open containers often filled with a semiliquid foodstuff, frequently gets very messy. Thus it needs to be maintained and cleaned frequently.